Snapshots
by Anthony J
Summary: A collection of vignettes focused on crucial moments for various characters spanning almost a century. Reviews are always appreciated.
1. Scabbers

I'm in the middle of a rather pleasant nap when the little blighter starts complaining about his inventory of brothers. Again. Forever griping about Bill the Head Boy and Charlie the Seeker and now Percy the Prefect; bemoaning the twins their marks and popularity. I daresay, if he studies half as hard as he whines, he'll become the most accomplished Weasley in a century.

I'm always tempted to bite him when he gets going about how horrible it is being the youngest of six boys, or the indignity of his second-hand belongings. I don't, usually, though I have left droppings in his shoes more than once. It just infuriates me that he grouses about people who actually enjoy his company; people who don't accuse him of being a demonic abomination when he moves things without touching them; people who don't lock him in a rancid basement with roaches and spiders and rats the size of badgers.

Of course, those rats probably saved my life, once I learned how to talk to them.

Any chance I have of dipping back into my dreams is gone when Ronnie Icklekins pulls me out of his jacket. The _Hogwarts Express_ looks just the same as it has since my own first day twenty years ago, and that's a monumental comfort. It means I'll be back within the walls of Hogwarts Castle within the day, and almost certainly back in Gryffindor Tower by tonight.

A bespectacled kid sits across the compartment. The redhead introduces me by the name his brother gave me all those years ago, and tells him just how useless I am. Which is fine. The less he expects from me, the better. I feign sleep as the two boys trade woeful tales of hand-me-down wardrobes and unsatisfactory birthday gifts, and I groan to myself that of course Ron would find another demoralized child to commiserate with. Misery, I've heard, loves company.

But then the kid with the glasses says something that shocks Ron and wakes me all the way up in an instant. _Voldemort_. The kid actually says the Dark Lord's name, like they're old friends. My curiosity gets the better of me; I give up the ruse and take a look at the kid, who's claiming that he's not trying to be brave or anything, and if a rat could scream, I certainly would have. As it is, I think I still squeak like a rusty gate, but it's drowned out by the clatter of the train.

The scar on his forehead is more than enough. But he has the same unruly brown hair and even the same eyeglasses as his father, and for one absurd moment, I might be looking at James through a rip in time. The resemblance is uncanny, except for his eyes; those are a green so startling that I think I can actually smell Lily's shampoo in the compartment.

The train speeds past fields full of cows and sheep, and I wonder at this sickening irony.


	2. Rebels

_Rebels are we, though heavy our hearts shall always be_

_No ball or chain, no prison shall keep_

_We're the rebels of the sacred heart_

_I said no ball or chain, no prison shall keep_

_We're the rebels of the sacred heart_

~ Flogging Molly, "Rebels of the Sacred Heart"

We gave them more credit than they deserved.

When Wood told us that his parents were being held in a detention facility on the Isle of Wight, we had expected a fortress fortified with unimaginable Dark magic and guarded by the most vile creatures in Voldemort's ranks.

What we found was little more than a concentration camp.

Most of the inmates were Muggles with wizarding family, and anyone magically-endowed had been stripped of a wand. The cells were bewitched with Anti-Disapparition Jinxes, and the complex was blanketed with a Caterwauling Charm, but little else protected the prison. The place was staffed with Imperiused acolytes; six actual Death Eaters administered the operation.

We probably didn't have to go in with everything we had, but Verity's advice was best: _go hard or go home_.

So we deployed a dozen Decoy Detonators modified with Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder, and waited beyond the barbed-wire fence. Fred mouthed a countdown, twirling his wand; Wood pulled on the Conspecs that Krum had enchanted, and as Fred reached zero, Krum and Verity donned theirs as well. My own dangled around my neck, and a moment before I got them on, blackness swept over us.

Someone shouted. I got my goggles on; my vision came back with stark blue clarity. Krum, Fred, Wood, and Verity clustered around me, absurdly calm and silent. Then Fred turned to me and flashed a vicious grin.

The assault was on. Wood and Krum vanished with a crack like thunder. Fred Blasted a twenty foot breach in the fence and rushed in.

I Stunned the nearest guards, Apparated ten meters away, slung another volley of spells, Apparated again. Wood, Fred, and Krum worked their way across the facility, incapacitating sentries and making for the cells. Verity and I broke off in the chaos, headed toward a low brick building, popping ten meters at a time and hurling hexes through the darkness to clear a path.

We approached the nearest door as a witch spilled out of it, still barking orders to someone inside. I hit her with a Deadweight Spell, dashed over her body, whipped a _Depulso_ jinx at the wizard in the hallway so hard it knocked him unconscious.

A blistering jet of light sizzled at me from my right, scorching my shoulder. I turned to see a hulking man brandishing his wand at the darkness. Before he could finish the word _Avad_—, Verity materialized next to him and hit him with a clean right hook that jarred his wand out of his hand.

Light crackled deeper down the hallway, and Wood's voice boomed. The first of the prisoners had been released, and were releasing more prisoners, who overtook the guards. We dashed into the adjacent hallway as two more Death Eaters fell, and when the last bolted into a room to the left, Verity barked _evanesco virga_ and rendered him defenseless.

The skirmish was over in seven minutes.

Two days later, our D.A. coins went hot for the last time.


	3. Unspoken

The window looked out onto asphalt.

Shards of glass sparkled across blacktop. Fidelma felt metal against her face; her head throbbed, her left side ached. Her back screamed as she pushed against what had not long ago been the side of the bus. Her palms skidded. She nearly lost her balance, but got her knees under herself. She lifted her hands like lead. They trembled, and she blanched at the sight of all that streaky blood.

She saw the seats from an absurd aerial angle that made her nauseous. Grey smoke churned through the cabin. Somehow, the engine kept running. She heard tires spinning uselessly against air.

She didn't know where she'd been going. Thinking made her light-headed; someone coughed. It was weak, and it brought a sudden clarity back to Fidelma's senses. She blinked away bitter fumes, shook her head to stop that piercing thrum. People shouted and cried. A horn brayed its long, lone tone.

Fidelma squinted through the shifting darkness and crawled along the metal toward the seats and the body crumpled among the glass. He gave another wheezing cough, and her stomach ran with ice when she saw him slumped into the blown-out window frame, his head against the macadam, his blonde hair matted with thick scarlet.

He blinked so slowly she thought he was going.

She scrambled to him, oblivious to the splinters of glass biting into her knees. The blood ran out of his hair, crisscrossed his face, spilled down his neck. Fidelma grabbed his hand, wrapped her fingers around his in a fierce grip; she felt him try to respond in kind but with none of her strength. His breath whistled in thin streams.

He opened his eyes again with too much effort. His glassy gaze wandered a moment before finding her face. When he locked on, his lips twitched in the trace of a grin.

"I can't feel my body," he told her in a rasping whisper. He looked like he wanted to laugh, but couldn't muster the force. Fidelma could see the worst of his injuries, a slash across the right side of his neck oozing blood like a crack in an erupting volcano.

"Shut up," she ordered. He cocked an eyebrow at her, and that grin flickered again.

She reached her free hand into her jacket, dug into a concealed pocket, and froze. Her wand was gone. Her grip tightened on his hand as pinpricks of giddy panic burst through her brain. She had tucked the wand into that pocket before stepping on the bus. She remembered doing it, because she remembered him asking why she carried it at all.

He watched her now, but his eyelids sagged. She saw his consciousness waning, and leaned over him. "Look at me, you ugly bloody Squib!"

"Hey," he coughed as he forced his eyes open again. "I'm not ugly."

"I know you're not," Fidelma agreed, reaching for his neck without thinking. "You're blooming gorgeous." She clamped her palm over that seeping cut, squeezing as hard as she could with the slick grip she had despite the grimace of fresh pain that shot across her brother's face. She turned as much as possible, ignoring the jagged lances that shot through her own neck, searching the scattered wreckage for her wand. She considered for one brief, horrible moment that it might have snapped, but she didn't see it anywhere.

"Lost it, huh…" she heard him say. The words faded, and Fidelma spun back to see his eyes sliding closed.

"Eadulf," she yelled in his face; "You open your soddin' eyes!" But he didn't, and she felt herself crying. Fidelma Thackery did not cry, and the tears rushing now terrified her more than anything. Something exploded inside of her at that, something blinding and ancient, and she screamed _constocruentus_ from the bottom to the top of her mind.

Intense heat surged through her hands. A brilliant whiteness flashed, and Eadulf's eyes flew open. He sucked in a vicious breath, stronger than he had since the world had gone sideways, and he looked at Fidelma with clear eyes.

She slumped back against the seat, still gripping his hand.

His bleeding had stopped.

It would be enough.


	4. Wild Aspirations

You chase the little git down the hill, flinging jinxes at his back as he dodges and weaves between the trees. He's a right nimble blighter, but you're faster.

You hear him laughing up ahead, and even though this is a game you've played a hundred times, you're not about to let him get away with mocking you. You sling another Tickling Jinx at him, and he darts out of its path, disappearing into the underbrush. The blue spark ignites the dry leaves carpeting the ground, and you stamp out the flames as you rush by.

You duck through the foliage a second before you hear the snapping to your right. You spin, certain that you're about to catch the sneaky little bugger doubling back on you. And that's when a howling four-foot blur comes flailing at you from your left. You can't even get yourself turned around in time to throw a decent spell before impact, and you're thrown off your feet.

The next thing you know, that four-foot blur has resolved into your brother, and he's kneeling on your chest with his foot pinning your wandhand to a rock. He's got his own wand jabbed into the side of your neck, just below your ear, and a wicked grin splayed across his face.

"Yield," he says, as threateningly as a twelve-year-old can manage.

You know you could throw him off with little effort and hex him bald, because about the only spell he can reliably cast is a _Lumos_ charm. But he outmaneuvered you, and without the benefit of magic, and as irritated as you are to have been outsmarted by a kid five years your junior, you can't quite stifle the rush of pride at the sight of your kid brother triumphant.

So you grit your teeth, and force yourself to say it. "I yield."

His grin widens, and he climbs off your chest, releasing your wand-hand. You flex the wrist to get feeling back into your fingers, then climb to your feet even as your brother starts down the hill without waiting. That rush of pride recedes in a hurry, and you find yourself startled by what a smug little prat he's turning out to be. You assure yourself that you couldn't possibly have been that arrogant when you were his age, and start after him, heading back into town.

"When I'm Minister of Magic," your brother calls from ten paces further on, "you can tell everybody how I beat you."

"Really," you scoff. It's all you can do not to laugh in his face. "You can't even cast a proper Hover Charm. And you're going to lead Wizarding Britain?"

"I am," he confirms, and now you do laugh. Except that part of you thinks he just might do it. He's a Slytherin for a reason.

Minister Cornelius Oswald Fudge.

You shake your head to dislodge that ridiculous image. "You've got some wild aspirations, mate." But then, your little brother always has been a strange nut.


	5. Nobody Knew

Dennis stared into the empty glass.

He contemplated the dilemma for a few short moments, flagged down the bartender, ordered another pint. His fifth of the evening. The pub was within walking distance of his flat, after all, and his ability to hold his booze was legendary. Tonight he intended to go the full dozen: one for each year that Colin had been gone.

The second of May had blindsided him this year. He'd been so wrapped up in his work brewing a catalogue of draughts for George's store that he'd lost track of his days. He supposed that he should have been more aware since George's birthday party last month, if for no better reason than who wasn't there.

But the mind could hide all sorts of things from itself when it really needed.

Jack delivered a fresh pint, and Dennis watched the amber swirls like an epiphany might be floating in the ale. He found only barley, and as he drained the top third of the drink, he felt the weight of the Galleon in his pocket. It usually stayed tucked away in the bottom drawer of his office desk, buried under a stack of research. Once a year, he fished it out and took it on a pub-crawl through Hereford, washing away the sharp edges of the world with a flood of alcohol.

He dug the coin out of his pocket there at the bar, reading the blurred serial number. The date of Colin's murder. His own was long gone, a casualty of the Swindon skirmish where Natalie McDonald had saved his life. He tapped the Galleon absently against the bar, drinking another few centimeters off his beer. Jack glanced back at the sound; when he saw the exotic coin in Dennis's hand, he flashed a small, sad smile, and said nothing.

Jack hadn't mentioned it in years. He'd asked about it that first night Dennis had drifted in; Dennis had told him it was a bloody badge of honor, then drained two quick pints. Now he laid the coin flat on the countertop, and listened to the raucous punk rock surging from the jukebox.

Nobody knew. Dennis reminded himself again that Lucius Malfoy had committed suicide. The _Prophet_ ran the story, the Ministry confirmed the cause of death, and that racist git had been thrown in a hole. Three months after murdering Colin, the Blonde Bastard drank a fatal dose of hemlock. That was the story; it's what everybody knew.

Dennis swigged half what was left of his drink. He had been sure that dealing with Malfoy would make things better, balance the scales. An eye for an eye. And it had, for a time. But then the nightmares started, and he couldn't sleep through the night. Now he was lucky to get an hour at a time, even with his most potent Sleeping Draughts.

The world felt jagged and surreal and fragile. And nobody knew.

He drained his pint, flagged down Jack, ordered another.


	6. Everborn

There is piercing and tightening and I am moving-without-moving through the interspace.

I answer the panic-call of my other-mind, the one that is me and not-me, within me and beyond me. It is the summons of my outersoul, we who are united by the infinite energies that shimmer across the world and all of the in-between.

I appear aloft in a sprawling hall above smoke and lightning and the ruined fountain of living gold. Down and below, the spellweavers are at war, dislocating the ancient currents of spirit-air by the force of their tremendous will. My flightless-self whips the wood-rod and knits a thread of red-heat that binds the one we battle, but the pale and fractured hate-walker inflicts mutations into the pattern of the thought-words.

The red-heat thread unravels, respells itself into a vicious slither-scales held together by chaotic designs of unthinking wrath. I see the deathmonger slip through the interspace in a timeless flash, and then the speartooth rage-snake lurches at my wingless-self. The Brokensoul refracts a churn of ancient energy through the splintered lens of destruction and hurls a hot green death-spark that sparkles like the end of the All.

I dive from the uppermost, wings splayed, reeling through the air like the furies of the Great Dawn sent to slash and unmake. I lunge between the spellweavers, between he-that-is-me and he-that-would-slay, and I take in that most evil anomaly of all-that-is. It will negate me; that is its purpose. So I choose to be void in the me-that-is-me.

Yet even if the me-that-is-me is void, and the matter that binds my innersoul is unwoven and cast to the winds, my outersoul resides in the me-that-is-not-me and the body that binds my other-mind. And if I am void in order that my unflying-me is not void, I shall remain everborn.

The sharp taste of hatred and hemlock blisters my throat as the boiling unbeing floods this brittle body. The burning dying blooms from the inside, coiling around my innersoul and tightening until all is flame and mist and darkness, and I am no more.

I sense in an unknowing way as the blazing vestige that was me-unbecoming tumbles to the floor of the sprawling hall. The me-reforming lays tiny, wrinkled, and featherless on the polished wood, and that is as it should be. Because in my awareness of the existence of the me-that-is-me is an awareness that the me-that-is-not-me, the wingless vessel of my outersoul, the spellweaving Longbeard has not been made void.

In the thunderbooms and flashingbursts of the world collapsing, he finds me and lifts me from the ground, reuniting we two parts of the same whole, and tucks the me-that-is-becoming-me-again into the pocket of his robes. Time passes, as time does, and when he brings me forth again, I croak feebly as he gently settles me into a tray of soft fire-dust.

I sense that I have fulfilled a purpose in being.

I have protected my outersoul, and by doing so preserved my innersoul.


	7. So Long

_Here's to you, I sing for my daddy-o  
As I lay him down to sleep  
It's been so long, since I lost my daddy-o  
Hope he's watchin' over me._

~ Flogging Molly

Brittle shafts of morning light slanted through the canopy, scattering across the narrow footpath cutting between the trees.

Teddy could walk this path in his sleep – had, once – but it never got easier. By the time he passed the buckthorn grove a hundred meters back, he felt like he was trudging up a mountainside while fighting off a Deadweight Spell. It was an arduous trek, but one that he made regularly, and increasingly often in the last year. With graduation nearing and his Aurorship training beginning in August, he knew he'd never again be so readily able to visit these gardens on a whim.

A warm breeze swept along the trail, and Teddy heard a firelark's haunting song. Victoire tread the path wordlessly at his side, the wind fluttering her hair and catching the light from a million brilliant angles. He could never decide if she was a blonde or a redhead; just then, she was both at once, and stunning.

Soon the trees receded and the path widened before opening out into a clearing. Teddy and Victoire waded through the tangled undergrowth and shin-high silverweed to a sandy mound rising out of the grass. There they stopped before a pair of towering birch trees, taller than anything in sight, growing so close together that their branches had become entwined in a fantastic embrace.

Victoire's fingers entwined with Teddy's, and she looked to him with those eyes so pale they were violet. This was not the first time she'd come out here with him; she knew what this place was.

"Go to them," she told him with a sad smile. Teddy smiled back and squeezed her hand, then stepped into the shade between the trunks of the trees.

He reached for one, tracing his fingertips over its cracked bark, then reached for the other to touch its coarse skin. He stood between the trees and felt his wand, tucked away in an inside pocket of his robe, warm immediately. His wand, which had once been his father's wand almost two decades ago, which had belonged to his father's father before that.

A familiar sensation swirled through him in that shadowy place where life and death stood side by side, a jagged fusion of vast contentment and tragic sorrow. Teddy thought how absurd it was that he should be the son of martyrs; that his life should have overlapped theirs by less than a month so long ago; yet that he should feel as if they were standing just behind him now in the shade of these two birch trees.

Then a stray rivulet of sunlight broke through the warren of branches. The wand in Teddy's pocket went cool again. The connection, if there had ever been one, was gone; he dropped his arms to his sides as he stepped out of the shade. Victoire took both of his hands in hers, leaned down to kiss his forehead, then climbed down from the mound and led him out of the clearing.


	8. Comma

The last student shuffled in, found his seat; Binns began his lecture.

He picked up where he'd left off last class. Discussing Death Eaters and Horcruxes and all manner of sinister history that should have been fascinating. He wasn't fascinated. His students weren't fascinated, but he didn't even know that. He didn't care anymore. He didn't even regret that he didn't care anymore.

It had been a tedious process, that loss of interest. His concern with the world had flaked away one bit at a time as he gradually lost the things he'd stayed behind for, until he realized that there was nothing left to keep him here. Except, that didn't matter anymore, because it wasn't a choice he could unmake.

Being a ghost hadn't been bad, at first. Disorienting, but in an intriguing sort of way, like skimming across the surface of a lucid dream. He'd been reading the autobiography of Nimue that Elizabeth had given him for his birthday when he'd fallen asleep in front of the fireplace. Next he knew, he was standing in Flourish & Blotts, looking at his father, wondering just how it was that Hrothbert Binns looked exactly the same as he had 31 years ago, before he'd died.

His father had explained that the men of the Binns family tended to die young, and that everyone was waiting if he was ready to see them. But he'd thought of Elizabeth then as he stood among the books with his dead father. And before he knew that he'd even made a choice at all, he was back in his office, disembodied and utterly numb, looking at his own corpse.

It was been an impulsive decision, and it was exactly the kind of choice that made him hate impulsive decisions. He had been a logical man, and he was a logical ghost; but in the instant between the two, he had abandoned logic and given in to something else. And it hadn't been bad. Once Elizabeth had gotten over the shock of her husband waking her to tell her he was dead in the other room, she'd settled into life with his ghost quite comfortably.

He'd taught; she'd bred plants. They had been happy.

He should have known it couldn't last.

Because death should be a period, but his had been a comma. Elizabeth died thirteen years later; he'd waited in the bedroom for eight days, but she hadn't come back. Perhaps she'd gone on because she believed that he could simply decide to cross over when she did. That wasn't how it worked, but she couldn't have known that. He chose to believe it, and clung to the idea for a few decades, but he didn't even care about that now.

He had stayed behind because he couldn't be without her. Now he couldn't be with her because he'd stayed behind.

So he droned on about the Battle of Hogwarts.

Scorpius Malfoy straightened in his seat. Binns didn't notice, because he just didn't care.


	9. Don't Panic

"There you are," Hecate hollered.

Victoire hadn't returned to Ravenclaw Tower last night, nor been there in the morning when Hecate woke up. The next most logical place to look, given the time of the morning, was the Great Hall, and that was where Hecate found her, bent over three open textbooks and countless sheaves of parchment. No one sat within five feet of her.

Hecate dropped onto the bench beside her, sweeping away enough parchment to set down a plate and fill it with food.

"Hey!" Victoire whined wearily, so uncharacteristically that Hecate was sure the girl hadn't slept in days. "That's – "

"Hey is for horses," Hecate interrupted, and Victoire fell silent as her sleep-deprived brain tried to process the pun. She attempted a glare at Hecate but only managed to look haggard as she reached for her notes, collecting them up haphazardly.

"I've read these books forty-two bloody times," she insisted, stacking pages into piles on the bench beside her. "I don't know the material any better than I did when I started, despite all the notes I took, and all the notes I borrowed from Warren, and is that a bath-towel?" she finally demanded, pointing at the bath-towel slung over Hecate's shoulder.

"It is," Hecate confirmed.

"Why?" Victoire asked.

Hecate chewed a piece of bacon. "Because it's Towel Day."

"What in the name of Circe's swine is Towel Day?"

"It is the day," Hecate explained, grinning, "when one carries one's towel."

Victoire blinked, her expression blank. Perhaps she thought there must be more to the story; perhaps she thought Hecate was having her on. Or perhaps she was convinced that nothing in the world could be so simple.

Hecate leaned on the table, looked Victoire in the eyes, "I'm going to give you some of the most practical advice in the universe."

Victoire watched her hopefully. Hecate told her: "Don't panic."

"Don't panic?" Victoire repeated. "I couldn't get into the Tower last night because I couldn't answer the riddle because my brain won't work, I've got fourteen exams in the next two weeks, and – "

"See: this?" Hecate cut in, gesturing to the totality of Victoire's demeanor. "This is you panicking. Right now, you're not a woman who knows where her towel is."

"Of course I'm panicking," Victoire blurted, drawing several nervous glances. "If I tried to levitate a feather right now, I'd probably set it on fire!"

"Alright," Hecate said decisively. She finished her breakfast, then slipped her wand out and, before Victoire could react, said _evanesco libris_. The books and pages vanished with a rustle even as Victoire grabbed for them, and Hecate stood, hauling her friend by the arm. "You're skiving off classes for the rest of the day, you're going back to the dorm, and you're going to sleep."

"How am supposed to sleep with – " Victoire whined, too tired to properly resist.

"I'm going to mix you up a Pan Galactic Gargle-Blaster," Hecate said with a grin. "You'll sleep just fine."


	10. Wilder Aspirations

You smother a grin at this latest pandemonium you've incited.

It's never your intention to get the family all lathered up, but it always seems to be an entertaining consequence. Your pronouncements have a way of making holidays truly memorable. Your Uncle Clement wants to know why you always make a scene at these dinners, but you're too busy listening to your mother and father argue to answer him.

"Well if that's what he wants to do, Miranda," your father tells your mother. You can't help feeling a surge of affection for the old man, trying to reason with a headstrong Chamberlain woman. "I don't see the sense in trying to talk him out of it."

"Don't see the sense?" Clement laughs mirthlessly, no longer interested in your sense of theatrics. "He wants to piddle away an entire year, Cornelius! With Muggles!" He looks back at you and throws his hands up. "Madness!"

"Summer before seventh year," your mother begins, and you recognize the opening to her litany of your wilder aspirations, "you wanted to be a Basilisk hunter."

"If you would've let me go with Scamander's expedition that July," you insist, "I would have been on the cover of the _Daily Prophet_ with a 57-foot King Serpent."

"Nine members of that team died on Hedgehope Hill," your father reminds you.

"Two years later," your mother continues unabated, "you swore you were going to find Excalibur."

"Ah, right," you nod, your sarcasm masked as agreement. "Because all I managed to find instead was Hrunting," you tell her. "As I recall, the Ministry paid over a quarter-million Galleons for that treasured artefact."

"That was pretty cool," your cousin agrees from across the table, earning a sly wink from your father.

"Don't encourage him, Rufus," Clement scowls at his son, then turns back to you. "And don't you encourage him, Horatio."

"And last year," your mother rounds out her list, "you were adamant that you could develop a way to give Squibs back their magic."

"Preposterous!" Clement barks, oblivious to the curiosity on his wife's face. Aunt Violet has never told him about her brother the architect, and you can't really fault her for that. Your uncle has never been shy in his opinions on the magically-occluded, and his distaste for those who coddle them.

So you meet your mother's eyes, which is no easy task when she's sure she's right, but it's more to Violet that you say, "I'm still working on that, and I've made progress."

"Progress!" Clement scoffs, and you're tempted to throw a hex at him under the table. Instead, you reach for the coronation chicken without looking at him.

"Progress," you say firmly. "And I'll continue my research in Ontario." You spear a piece of chicken and deliver it to your mouth. "The paperwork's already been filed with the Canadian Wizarding Parliament. I'll be living among the Muggles in Toronto, and writing up my findings." You grin; "I might even write a Muggle Studies textbook."

Clements roars with laughter: "Hopeless!"


	11. 11 Seconds

The umpire's whistle screamed.

The Snitch took off like a shot, darted toward the opposition grandstands. Ginny tracked it, circling the pitch, keeping an eye on Orion McDermid aloft near the commentator's tower. The Snitch flashed in the sunlight above and behind him; he glanced down, then plunged into a steep dive. The Wronski Feint.

Ginny grinned, rushed at the Snitch, her Harpies uniform snapping in the wind. The winged ball froze for one second, apparently surprised to be seen.

One second was all she needed.

"An unbelievable new European League record!" the commentator boomed as she landed:

"Eleven seconds!"


	12. When It Snows

The grass was cool and wet under Luna's bare feet.

That didn't necessarily bother her. It was just the first thing she noticed when she awoke in Marston Park. She wasn't even terribly surprised to find herself standing beside this fountain. She had been dreaming of the Park since her mum's funeral all those weeks ago. So it seemed quite reasonable to her that she would have walked out here.

A fine mist clung to the lawns. The moon blazed in the January sky, turning the Park a ghostly silver. There would be snow, but not tonight. And when there was, she would come back here and she would make snow angels until she couldn't feel her legs. Her mum had taught her how to make snow angels when she was six. They had both flopped over beside this fountain and waved their arms and legs madly, giggling like a couple of daft bananas. That was what her father had called them, but he had been giggling too.

They had made thousands of snow angels since then. Luna watched the waters of the fountain scattering the bleached moonlight at a million brilliant angles. Her mum was a moonbeam. That was what her father called her, for as long as Luna could remember. Even now, all these months later. Her mum would never make another snow angel.

Her heart burned in her chest, and her breath turned to ice in her lungs. She wanted to scream and howl and tear down the world before the fury and agony ripped her apart. She stood in the grass in her bare feet and pyjamas, and watched the water surge out of the fountain. She didn't move, hardly breathed. The cascade warped in the still night.

She heard footsteps, and blinked. The tumble of water returned to its usual arc. Luna turned, and peered silently across the Park. A figure materialized out of the mist, tall and moving slowly, wrapped in a cloak with a hood pulled up against the cold.

A woman's voice reached out through the pearly shadows. "Luna?"

"Mum?" The figure paused. It was not her mum. Luna knew that he mum never would have paused. Then the woman took another few steps and the fog parted around her. She reached the fountain, and Luna looked up at her. "Hello, Mrs. Diggory."

"Are you alright, dear?" Demeter Diggory asked, gentle concern in her voice.

Luna glanced to the fountain. The water fell into the pool at its base in a perfectly ordinary flow. Luna chose to believe that it had never done otherwise. "I think I am."

"Amos saw you from the window of his study," Mrs. Diggory explained.

Luna turned back to this woman who had emerged from the mist like a prophet in a dream. Mrs. Diggory's dark hair spilled out the sides of her hood around her neck. It was majestic, the rich color of soot. It was, Luna thought, the hair of a Countess.

Mrs. Diggory watched the girl, and asked: "What are you doing out here?"

"I don't really know," Luna answered. "I think I sleepwalked."

Mrs. Diggory took another step toward her. "You don't have any shoes."

Luna wiggled her toes, enjoying the sensation of the cool, wet grass under her feet. "I don't wear shoes to bed," she explained as if that much should have been obvious.

Mrs. Diggory paused, and flashed a tiny smile. Then she produced her wand, and with a flourish and a mumbled incantation, conjured a pair of sneakers out of the chilly air. Luna gasped in a delight. They were exactly the shade of fuchsia that would match the wisteria-colored socks her grandmother had given her for Saturnalia. She took them from Mrs. Diggory, pulled them on, tied the laces, and admired them from above.

They were just her size. She looked back up to Mrs. Diggory. "Thank you."

"Of course," Mrs. Diggory said. She smiled so beauteously that Luna couldn't help smiling back, and all thoughts of tearing down the world were banished. At least for one night. Luna turned and started through the Park, back toward the road that would take her home, when Mrs. Diggory called after her. "Do you want me to Apparate you?"

She paused near a wide stone bench. "I know the way."

"Okay," Mrs. Diggory said, hesitant.

Luna took a few more steps, but then she paused again. She turned back to see Mrs. Diggory standing in the mist in her hooded cloak with the soot-colored hair of a countess. Luna looked at her sneakers, and asked: "Do you know how to make snow angels?"

Mrs. Diggory shook her head with a kind smile. "I'm afraid I don't, dear."

"I can show you," Luna told her, and she smiled. "When it snows."


End file.
